


Blessed with beauty and rage

by SecondStarOnTheLeft



Series: Alea iacta est [13]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Depression, F/M, Gen, Postpartum Depression, Recovery, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-08
Updated: 2016-07-08
Packaged: 2018-07-22 10:15:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7432274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondStarOnTheLeft/pseuds/SecondStarOnTheLeft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lyanna looks to the tiny babe, so bald and red-faced, with his colourless eyes and tiny toes, and chokes on what she has done to him just by bringing him into the world.</p><p>*</p><p>Lyanna survives the tower, and the world turns on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blessed with beauty and rage

**Author's Note:**

> What hiatus.
> 
> Title from _Ultraviolence_ by Lana Del Rey

**i.**

"He cannot be your son," Ned says, "not if you want him to live."

Lyanna looks to the tiny babe, so bald and red-faced, with his colourless eyes and tiny toes, and chokes on what she has done to him just by bringing him into the world.

"He cannot be your son, either," she says, "because everyone  _knows_ you."

**ii.**

Ashara Dayne's heart breaks into screaming halves when she unwraps her brother's sword, and Lyanna understands. Her own heart did the same, when eventually she was told of Father's fate, and Brandon's. 

The babe bound to her chest seems to ease Lady Ashara's pain somewhat, which strikes Lyanna as peculiar, until Ned begins to blush and Lady Ashara says "Oh, but he looks like Brandon."

The babe is still bald and red-faced, his eyes still pale and his toes still small, and Lyanna sees nothing of her brother there. But a broken heart can reshape the world, so perhaps Lady Ashara is seeing what she wishes to see, rather than what is there.

The wetnurse they send to Lyanna, in her tower room, whispers that Lady Ashara lost a babe with soft brown hair and a long jaw. Lyanna aches for this last, lost piece of Brandon, and knows that she can never give his name to her babe.

Ned can name him. Ned is deciding who her son is, after all, so it seems only fair that he name the babe.

**iii.**

"He is Brandon's son," Ned says to Jon Arryn, when his foster-father comes to meet them off their ship in King's Landing. Lyanna had wanted to sail on for White Harbour, but a ship flying the Baratheon standard had come alongside them with orders from the King.

Robert Baratheon, a  _king!_ She would laugh, if she weren't so afraid.

"He is a fine lad," Jon Arryn says. "Bastard or no, a son is always to be celebrated."

Lyanna looks at the old man's cold hands and sunken cheeks and hold on Ned, and turns away. This is the man who failed to shape Robert. Mayhaps it is best that he has no sons.

**iv.**

"Lady Ashara Dayne," Ned says, when Robert eventually thinks to ask who the babe's mother was. Lyanna's belly is still soft and she still cannot sit a horse, but the babe is not hers, because if he is her son, Robert will kill them both, and Ned with them. "She- she threw herself into the sea in grief, Robert. Her brother and I agreed that it was best that the babe be raised at Winterfell."

Lyanna does not mention that she saw Ashara Dayne fleeing down the spiralling staircase outside the Palestone Tower by moonlight, cloaked and hidden and visibly gleeful, because that might mean breaking the secret. If her the babe grows pale hair and purple eyes, well, the Sword of the Morning had those, before his starlight hair turned red with his lifeblood. 

"Have you named him yet?" Robert asks, and Ned glances to Lyanna for help - because no, they have not named the babe. Ned thinks to name him Jon, for his stepfather, but Brandon would never have wanted a babe named  _Jon._  

"Beron," she says. "Beron Snow."

Robert looks her up and down, lingers a moment on the babe, and then away.

Her ribs creak with relief.

**v.**

Cersei Lannister is so beautiful that even Lyanna, who feels tired beyond such things, finds some little twist of jealousy stirring in her belly.

But Cersei Lannister is to marry Robert Baratheon, and Lyanna is free of him, free as she wished to be so long ago.

She looks at the babe in her arms and wants to laugh and wants to weep, because his life is surely not worth Father's and Brandon's and hundreds of others.

**vi.**

"Someday," Catelyn Tully says, smoothing a shining bone comb through Lyanna's wet hair, "things may be different."

There had been a small feast the night before, to welcome Ned home as Lord Stark, to honour Catelyn Tully as the new Lady Stark, to celebrate victory in the war against Mad Aerys.

Not one man in the hall had raised his cup to Lyanna. They had gone to war for her, everyone said, but they hated her for it. 

"Better I had died," Lyanna says, smiling a little when the colour flees Catelyn Tully's spring-freckled face. "Then they could forget that I am a whore, not a ghost."

**vii.**

Lyanna sometimes thinks that she  _is_ a ghost, trapped in some thin sort of place between here and there by the spectres of all who died because she made the wrong choice.

Sometimes, when her head is all full up with and wrapped around by thick grey wool, when her arms are weighed down by Father's soul and Brandon's and her heart shatters under the weight of Rhaegar's stupidity, she thinks she hears her mother's voice, promising her that there is more than this.

But she hears so many things that she knows this must be a lie. 

**viii.**

"I will raise the boy," Benjen says, bouncing his nephew on his lap as they all sit around the fire in Ned's solar. The boy is smaller than Ned and Catelyn Tully's Robb, with hair that is growing in dark brown and eyes that are the same grey as Ned's precisely and a long jaw like Father's.

Lyanna begrudges the boy Father's look, almost as much as she does the claim of Brandon's blood. He is not Father's, not Brandon's, not  _anyone's,_ and it is not  _fair._

"He is my nephew as much as yours, Ned," Ben goes on, oblivious to Lyanna's anger. "He could have a good life with me. Away from Winterfell, where people will  _look_ at him."

Ben knows the same stories they all do, of bastards turned hungry by seeing what their trueborn brothers had. This boy, people will say, might have been Brandon's heir, in another life - why should he  _not_ be a Stark, people will say, when there are so few left?

"You are too young, Ben," Ned says patiently, rocking slightly when Robb begins to stir against his chest - the boy's cheeks are as red as his hair, his chin shining with spit, and Lyanna fancies that she can almost see his first tooth through his shiny pink gums. 

The other boy has already cut his first tooth, but he did not cry and wail as Ned's son does. Beron is quiet, always quiet, even when fussing, and is kept away in the nursery unless Benjen hunts him out. 

"I am five-and-ten soon," Ben points out. "And then I will be six-and-ten, old enough to have my own holdings - please, Ned, can I raise him? I will be good to him, I promise you - I could never but be good to a child of my own blood."

Lyanna flees, then, near knocks Catelyn Tully flat on her arse as she runs through the door, and cannot understand why she is sobbing by the time she reaches the heart tree.

Ned finds her there, hours later, and pulls her into his lap as if she is a child.

She sometimes feels as though she still is.

**ix.**

Her belly becomes smooth again, her breasts firm, but the silvery lines are still there, and the knowledge that what lies between her legs is no longer a secret place makes her blush, when Catelyn Tully tries to talk to her a little about what she endured.

 _Endured._ Did she endure it? She thought she fought it, from the moment she realised just what Rhaegar really wanted of her, but perhaps she is wrong. 

She has been wrong about so many things, since Harrenhall.

**x.**

"I'm so tired, Ned," she says, because only Ned and Howland Reed and absent Ashara Dayne know the truth of it all. "All the hurt I have caused, and it has all come to lies and secrets."

"Mayhaps," Ned says, arm tight around her shoulders as they sit together and look at the face on the heart tree, "you ought to consider that it was not all your fault, Lya."

**xi.**

Spring is blooming fully by the time Catelyn's belly swells once more with child. 

Lyanna is still a ghost in Winterfell, lingering in the thin places because no one wants her in the open, but she is the first person Ned and Cat share their happy news with, and she is thrilled for them when she is not out of her mind with jealousy.

Lyanna is a ruin with no children, after all, a woman no man will ever want. How can she be anything  _but_ jealous of Ned and Catelyn and their growing family?

**xii.**

Ben asks her to visit him, in his holdfast just beyond the White Knife.

She has not gone yet. She misses him, but the boy is there, and she cannot bear it.

**xiii.**

Lyanna cries so hard when Ned departs after telling her that Catelyn has birthed a healthy girl that she makes herself sick.

Jory finds her, curled in on herself and miserable, in the broken stall at the far end of the stables. She used come here with Brandon, where he would tell her dirty stories and teach her things he had learned from Father, and sometimes he would let her have a taste of ale, just to laugh at the faces she would pull.

"I just want to  _live_ , Jory," she tells him, drunk off ale despite her distaste, "why can't I just  _live?"_

**xiv.**

An invitation comes, asking her to visit White Harbour, and she knows that Jory spoke to Ned.

She is so relieved to be away from Catelyn's joyous new motherhood that she does not even mind.

**xv.**

Leona Manderly has two beautiful daughters, and Lyanna finds herself laughing at their antics as she never could at Ned's son.

 _I want what you have,_ she writes to Ned,  _what Leona Woolfield has._

**xvi.**

Suitors are few and far between, of course, because sister to the Lord of Winterfell or not, she is also Rhaegar's whore, a silly girl who spread her legs and split the realm.

 _I did not want that,_ she wants to scream.  _I only wanted to be free of Robert._

**xvii.**

Wendel Manderly laughs, when she asks him why he should seek to court a whore.

"Why, my lady," he says, shaking his round head with his shoulders still shaking, "if you are a whore for lying with one man who spirited a child away in the night, then what am I, who has known a hundred women?"

She blinks at him, stunned, and he laughs again.

"You were young," he says, "and not so clever as you thought you were. Many of us have been in the same position - you were just found there by someone more dangerous than a taphouse whore."

He is not awfully older than her - three years, mayhaps four - and for all that he is very fat he has a beautiful smile, and shares it often.

There are worse men, Lyanna thinks. She escaped one such with another, and wonders if she might have something of what happiness Ned has found if she accepts Wendel Manderly's offer of a dance.

**xviii.**

"Brandon's son," she tells him, knees pressed to his hip in their bridal bed, "is not Brandon's son at all."

"I know," Wendel says, fingers playing with the hem of her shift, all the clothes she has left to her and only that because Ben swung her over his shoulder and  _ran_ when others tried to strip her further. "He is yours, and Rhaegar Targaryen's."

She blinks at him, stunned, but he does not laugh this time.

"I don't believe anyone else knows, my lady," he says, "but I have come to know you better than anyone else outside of your brothers, while I have been courting you. You have more secrets than you deserve weighing down your heart, but one of them pushes down on your very soul every time you look at the boy."

"You must think me heartless," she says, tracing the merman stitched into the linen of his smallclothes - such a funny affectation, but so terribly Manderly that she cannot even mind - and not daring to look him in the eye. "That I cannot even look at my own child without wanting to scream."

He tips her face up with big, gentle fingers under her chin.

"Not heartless," he assures her, "but hurting, I think, more than you even realise."

**xix.**

She sits by Ben at table the next day, and forces herself to look the boy in the face.

He is the living image of Brandon as a boy, of Ned, of Benjen, of  _her._

"Hello, Beron," she says softly, "I am your aunt Lyanna."

His smile is shy, so quiet compared with Robb's easy cheer, and when her heart breaks this time, it does not even hurt.

**xx.**

"It is not terribly far, from here to your brother's holdings," Wendel says when finally she has screamed their Willam into the world. The sun shines bright through the window, catching on the boy's tufts of fair hair as he rests in Wendel's arms, hilariously small against his father's bulk, and the whole world seems a different place than it was when last Lyanna rested after giving birth. 

"Mayhaps," she says, "when I have recovered, and when Willam is strong enough, I might finally take Benjen up on his invitations. Do you think I could?"

"When do I ever deny you anything?" Wendel asks, rolling his eyes in place of his usual laughter, for fear of disturbing the babe. "It will do us all good to see something new, I think."

Lyanna wonders if Beron will like the look of Willam, and finds herself hoping that he does.

Mayhaps, someday, he can be her son and live. For now, she will content herself with what she has.


End file.
